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NIMTUG

Northern Ireland Microsoft Technologies User Group

Mathew O'Hare

Database Naming Standards

In the late 80s, the only naming standard I saw for database objects were vague ones like 'tbl' for table, 'qry' for query.  I noticed that these were rather useless when you would get a list of about fifty tables and a few hundred stored procedures.

For tables, I started using things like 'Profile' for major single objects, 'Lu' for Lookups, 'Trans' for transactional tables, 'Bfr' for temporary buffers.  For stored procedures, I'd use 'sel' for select, 'upd' for update, etc.

When my stored procedures got into the hundreds, I added a single letter to the beginning to represent business area ('p' for property/real estate, 'i' for investor, etc.).  I’m starting to consider this for my tables as well.

Has anyone else come up with any naming convention ideas for larger projects?  I'm getting to the point where I'm going to put a business tag on my tables, I think.

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About mattohare

I've been working databases since the 70s. The early ones were on paper, mind. Started working with them in the 80s on computers. This has been the design of the database structures and the user interface to go along with them.
NIMTUG 2004-2008
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